Everything is permitted: a review of Assassin’s Creed

Taking the action-adventure genre to new heights is Assassin's Creed, a great …

Petals on a wet, black bough

The other big innovation is perhaps the more impressive in retrospect. The "social stealth" engine which Assassin's Creed employs certainly pushes the boundary on interactive AI. While the combat AI may not be all that great, the crowd mechanic works really well. There's a certain authenticity about the crowd that's surprising; it genuinely feels like the collection of a few hundred NPCs compose a living, breathing people moving about with their own agendas. They are constantly aware of their surroundings, however. Crowds react to whatever is going on.

Do something bad, and people will slowly back away, stare, or rat you out to nearby guards. Push a guard off a ledge, and screams will echo from the streets as nearby guards come to investigate the scene. It's quite impressive. What's more, helping citizens in the town unlocks various "social stealth" help in the form of monks that you can blend in with and move unseen through the city, and vigilantes who will be waiting around corners for you to run through with trouble and tie up the guards. Of course, the city can be cruel, and you'll often be harassed by beggars or need to push people out of the way as you make your escape.

The three systems—climbing, combat, and social stealth—in tandem create a compelling experience, especially when matched with the mission structure. As mentioned, you'll have the nine primary assassinations to work on, each which requires a fair amount of knowledge about the target before you're given the go-ahead. This is where the side missions come in.

Scattered about each of the city are a number of different objectives. Before you can begin hunting your mark in the streets, you must first gather intel. You do this by completing a few of the many different activities that lay in wait throughout each of the cities, which you can find by climbing to the high points of the city (called view points) and surveying the area. Eavesdropping, pickpocketing, helping citizens from crooked guards, satisfying the demands of informants: all of these are available to do in any order you please once they've been discovered. The beauty of the open-ended system is that there's always something different to try, and the missions change and vary over the course of the game.

The city can be as cruel as it can be kind.

Aside from the main and side missions, you'll also find a variety of flags hidden about every section of the world—though aside from bragging rights, it doesn't appear that they unlock anything. However, even without that, there's still a good dozen or so hours of gameplay here at a minimum: those complaining about shallow and short single player games need look no further.

While both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions are more or less identical, it's surprising that the PS3 version does indeed suffer from some problems—surprising, given that the game was originally announced as a PS3 exclusive. While some may nitpick over rather small things, there's only one really noticeable problem, and that's the framerate. Even in relatively remote sections of the game, combat usually leads to some noticeable drops in framerate for the PS3 version, and this gets worse during the course of the more intense scenes of the game. While it may not be a deal-breaker, it's certainly a shame that Ubisoft couldn't make the versions completely identical, and as a result the Xbox 360 version will likely be the version of choice for anyone owning both consoles. It should also be noted that standard-definition play will be enjoyed in letterbox on both systems, another potential technical disappointment for some users.

The final blood feather

Assassin's Creed is a great game. It's not perfect, by any stretch, but it's certainly one of the finer titles of the year and one of the best action-adventure games to date. For some, especially those who stick to the story missions, the game may be a little disappointing. There's not a lot of mission variety—you assassinate a lot of people and that's pretty much it—so that may limit enjoyment. For those who like to explore and experiment, however, Ubisoft's latest will be a dream and a perfect way to spend the holiday immersed and invested in a great game world.